Canada's telecom regulator has suspended its decision to allow Bell Canada to …

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Canada's telecom regulator has launched a new proceeding to reconsider its decision to allow usage based billing (UBB) throughout the land. That decision is now suspended in the wake of public furor over the call, which would have allowed Bell Canada to bill smaller competitive ISPs by data use rather than hitting them with a fixed monthly fee.

"The great concern expressed by Canadians over this issue is telling of how much the Internet has become an integral part of their lives," declared Konrad von Finckenstein, chair of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission.

Ya think? As indie ISPs started announcing steep rate hikes in the wake of the policy change, Canada's conservative government was hit with a tsunami of consumer outrage (see typically low-key One Ninja Alert below), and quickly told the CRTC to go back to the drawing board. The Prime Minister "will reverse this decision unless the CRTC does it itself," a top government official told newspapers.

We interrupt your normally scheduled programming for a message about UBB.

Sorry about that

And so it was done, and just in time apparently, since Bell Canada says it can't even keep track of its customers' data usage.

"Please note that we have identified an issue that may cause Internet usage shown on the site to be overstated in some cases," consumers were told last week when they logged into the telco's subscriber service pages, according to the Toronto Star site Moneyville. The Star says it has been getting lots of e-mails from subscribers who say Bell inflates their data consumption.

"In order to ensure we provide reliable information to all our clients, the usage tracker will be unavailable while we resolve the issue," the Bell missive continued. "We apologize for the inconvenience."

Meanwhile, there's an interesting discussion over at Ottawa e-commerce professor Michael Geist's blog about whether the policy was appropriate in the first place. Bell Canada has admitted before the government that its congestion problems don't happen on the last mile level; they happen before the traffic gets to a Central Office, from which data gets distributed to individual homes.

"This raises the question of why not offer the independent ISPs access to the network at the Central Office or at other earlier points in the network so that their users' traffic never causes congestion for Bell?" Geist wonders (hint—it would make it easier for indies to offer better service, he thinks).

But the news isn't all troubling for Canadian Internet lovers. The indie ISP TekSavvy, which dropped its monthly data cap of from 200GB to 25GB following the CRTC UBB decision, is now offering a new plan in the wake of the CRTC delay.

"We are reinstating the unlimited package, but the 200GB package will be changed—to 300GB!" the company announced in an e-mail message sent to subscribers.

You need discipline

Clearly everything is in flux in Canada when it comes to this issue. Although von Finckenstein announced the UBB delay at a government hearing held earlier this month, he told politicians that the CRTC still wants to "find economic ways to discipline the use of the Internet."

And the first of the CRTC's new proceeding questions clearly holds onto the assumption that the logic of metered billing makes sense. "Our approach is based on two fundamental principles," the Notice explains:

As a general rule, ordinary consumers served by Small ISPs should not have to fund the bandwidth used by the heaviest residential Internet consumers, and

It is in the best interest of consumers that Small ISPs, which offer competitive alternatives to the Large Distributors, should continue to do so.

The proceeding also asks whether the CRTC should establish a "minimum threshold level for the sale of bandwidth by Large Distributors to the Small ISPs and, if so, what should it be." A policy like this might limit which companies could take advantage of Canada's broadband line sharing rules.

Canadian consumers have through April 29 to get their feedback to the government.

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Matthew Lasar
Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Emailmatthew.lasar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@matthewlasar